Would You Believe . . . Three Columns?

This past week two entertainment greats passed away. Honestly, did anyone know that they were still alive? Yet comedian and television "star" Don Adams and Little Rascal Tommy Bond (Butch) both rated three column obits in the News Journal and probably many other papers across the land. Maybe the obit writers needed three columns to identify to the general public who these guys were. Maybe it was a slow news day, with no new pictures of dying people in New Orleans or Iraq to fill up space.

Here is my revised obit for Adams. I'll spare Tommy Bond because I have no recollection of him at all aside from his fighting with Alfalfa and Spanky over the coquetteish Darla.

Don Adams was a comedian in the days that it was easy to be considered funny by the public even though no one in entertainment actually was. Other non-funny, funny guys included Jerry Lewis, Mort Sahl, George Burns, Alan King, Shecky Greene, etc. These funny guys were considered by many to be the Kings of Comedy, but again, this was according to the same people who thought Don Adams was funny. As superagent Maxwell Smart in the TV show Get Smart, Don Adams had one funny bit-- never beginning a conversation with his Chief unless they were under "the cone of silence" so that their top secret conversations couldn't be heard (my boss Mel and I would conjure the cone of silence when we talked top secret stuff at our high level desk job managing the parking lots at the race track). The funny thing was that the cone of silence didn't work. It just created an annoying echo. That's about it, though. Him speaking into a shoe phone wasn't funny. Neither was his "would you believe" shtick. It remains a mystery that Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, two very funny guys, added to their comic genius by writing the Get Smart scripts. Funny all the way to the bank, I guess. With Don Adam's death look for DVD's to hit the shelves soon.